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Rebecca Smith on traveling and China

Football Ferns captain Rebecca Smith talks us through the perils of travel and the Ferns’ familiarity with China.

So we’ve been here before.

Anyone who follows the Football Ferns knows that our latest trip to China was for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 where we had a good showing drawing with Japan 2-2, playing tight in a 0-1 loss to Norway, and then with the opportunity to knock USA out of the Olympics, losing to them in some would call a blowout. The year before that, we made our first FIFA Women’s World Cup appearance since 1991 and lost to Brazil, Denmark, and China. There have been numerous other tours in between and in preparation for these events, but no Football Ferns team has ever come out of China with a result (unless you call our draw with Japan a result). This is a great opportunity for the Ferns, especially since China, surprisingly, did not qualify for the FIFA Women’s World Cup this year having been knocked out by Asia Champions, Australia, as well as Japan and North Korea.

But quite a bit has happened since the Australia part of this tour. Where to begin…

First of all, my brand new pink camera, oddly enough, ended up being designated the “team camera” which, that was passed around each day to a new “photographer” to capture all aspects of this tour. I have to admit, I felt just a bit uneasy lending my camera to the likes of the 17 year olds on our team who have a tendency of getting themselves into mischief but thought, yep, being on a team is all about trust, so I trusted them.

Big mistake. One player on our team, whose name I will NOT point out in this blog…got onto the bus with the camera and departed the bus and into the airport withOUT the camera, and realized it only later as we all sat down to eat at the airport. Good news on that front came today from a text message from the bus driver who had FOUND it under the seats! Big reliefs and lots of laughs there but hence, the lack of tons of photos from China!

We flew from Sydney to Hong Kong which took almost ten hours, landed in HK at 4am, and since we couldn’t check in until 7am, we took over a whole array of benches and slept, got on facebook, tweeted, emailed, skyped, watched movies, listened to our ipods, chatted, and just chilled… we all grabbed some food and the comfiest chairs we could find. Our midday flight flew us three hours from Hong Kong to Jinan Airport, we got all our luggage, were met by some really nice Chinese interpreters with flowers, walked out into the 31 degree 99% humidity heat, packed everything onto our bus and drove another three hours to our hotel. After a loooong day of travel, we were all really glad just to jump into the shower, get some dinner, and have a meeting before we all crashed at about 9pm.

These kinds of traveling conditions are really rough on the body, but also great practice for the upcoming World Cup where we will be flying from New Zealand to Switzerland, playing three games there, and then into Germany where the games will be only a few days apart and all over Germany. So we woke the following day and played China in 31 degree heat in a training game of three times 25 minutes, and although we lost, every single player on the squad got a chance to represent New Zealand, which is a feat in itself.

Another feat is the food in China. We eat mostly rice, veggies, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches since the Chinese diet is really different to our typical Western diets. That doesn’t stop us though from enjoying the whole experience. Today was a fantastic day waking up, eating breakfast, having a good stretching and yoga session with B-rad, our awesome sports scientist, a player meeting with John and Tony (Asst. Coach, who some say resembles Brad Pitt lunch, and a shopping outing to the markets where you can find EVERYTHING and Made in China! We saw everything from purses and underwear, to a baby pooing right in the middle of the stairs and a cute lady selling nuts who was shorter than 4 feet!

Tomorrow is the big game against China, which will be televised and in the Olympic Stadium here in Weifang. Wish us luck, cheer for the kiwis, and believe, just like we are doing!

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